Tag Archives: internet of things

If I look back at the past 10 years or so of my career, I believe there’s a continuum of interest – from my passion for / community building around application messaging systems (MQ, MQTT, and others), to building lightweight cloud-based services (Cloud Foundry and API platforms), and now, to working on what you can choose to see as a large scale, cloud messaging platform (Twitter).

Twitter is far more than that, of course. It’s also a platform that humans interact with more so than any of the other systems I’ve worked on in the past. From e-commerce to core banking systems, I’m pretty sure that none of the things I’ve helped to build in the past have had the same scale and impact in the world every day that Twitter has done. It also reflects my passion for people and communities – hell, I’m a guy with a History degree playing at being a technologist, and jumped into social media before the term even really existed, what else would you think I care about? OK, OK, yes I’ve also always been an early adopter of shiny new technologies… but my excitement with technology is almost always about what it enables us to do as humans every day.

So what’s the point of this post, other than to muse on this?

Well, Twitter also represents a nice confluence of my passion for the Internet of Things, sitting between those messaging systems and those cloud apps that I mentioned, and people.

Twitter is real-time, and live. By creating and curating my Twitter timeline, I follow the people (@), topics (#), and well – the things – that I care about most. I receive breaking news, follow along with what my friends and colleagues are up to, and learn about what is happening in the world in real-time. It’s a platform for both messages, and signals. The engineering and support efforts required to support all of this happening, with rapid response times and a solid user experience, are pretty impressive – hats off to my colleagues in those departments.

Twitter is also conversational, which means that it can make a great home for all those conversational interactions we’re hearing about with the resurgence of bots, helpers, and personal agents. In fact, we can think back to not too long after the Twitter API came about, to the Tweeting plant asking for water when the soil was dry, to see that these kinds of applications are no strangers to the platform.

I’ve spoken about these topics a number of times over the past couple of years, most notably at our first Flight conference in 2014, where I covered flood alerting, plants, ferries, sports events, houses, earthquakes, and more!

Soon after starting work at Twitter, I ended up helping a project to connect river sensors online. Right now, you can find local river stations in the UK on an interactive map, and then (if you’re interested) you can follow the ones that matter to you. It’s pretty cool stuff, and can help with flood alerting and monitoring as well as local awareness.

Talking of the environment, last year we ran a conceptual contest out of Twitter UK, inviting organisations to think about new ways to use the platform and build applications #PoweredByTweets. One of the winning entries was the idea that pigeons in London could be instrumented with tiny backpacks measuring air quality. At the exhibition of the winning entries in September, there was a display that mocked up how this could work.

Yesterday, the @PigeonAir patrol took flight for real in London, and for another day or two will act as a temporary set of mobile beacons that can report back air quality via Twitter conversations.

Like this:

As time has moved on, I’ve lavished less attention on my blog, which is a shame… “back in the day” I enjoyed writing for it, and gained a lot of value from doing so. It’s of no particular surprise to me that I’ve spent less time writing here in 2014 than in any of the previous years; but it is a regret. I blame my schedule, a general change in the way I interact online, and a lack of inspiration. Actually, that last one isn’t quite true: I’ve often been inspired, or felt the need to blog, but have found myself mentally blocked. I need to get over that!

Anyway… 2014, looking back… a little bit of a year in review.

The major life change this year was my move to Twitter, which has been very exciting and energising. I’m thrilled to have been invited to work with a team of exceptional people under Jeff Sandquist. In particular, this year I’ve had the short-lived opportunity to work with three brilliant and talented guys I want to say “thank you” to, for making my transition to my new role such a pleasure: Taylor Singletary, Sylvain Carle and Isaac Hepworth. A special shout-out too to my close friend and colleague based in London, Romain Huet, without whom I would have found the past nine months much less fun or easy-to-navigate! The whole team has been just amazing to work with, as have all my wonderful colleagues at the Twitter office in London #gratefulpipes

I’ve been involved in the launch of a couple of APIs (most notably the Mute API), and I’m getting to work on much of the external API surface, which plays well with my background and developer experience. We’ve completely relaunched our developer-facing website and forums in the past few months, which the whole team has worked hard on. I’m happy to see the focus of discussion on the developer forums substantially improved now that we’ve moved to the Discourse platform – the user experience is far better than we had with the previous solution.

Most importantly, this past quarter we launched Fabric, our new free mobile SDK and platform for iOS and Android, and delivered a swathe of improvements to the developer experience for mobile enthusiasts. We also ran our first mobile developer conference, Flight – I was excited to be there, and I’m looking forward to seeing that experience continue in 2015.

My background in the Internet of Things and MQTT space has partly carried over into my new life at Twitter, and I’ve had the opportunity to speak at a couple of events (including Flight) about how Twitter’s platform plays into that space. However, I’ve substantially stepped back from playing a major role in the MQTT community this year; a decision in part driven by the need to refocus on my new role, partly due to some personal hostility and “burnout” with a couple of specific issues, but mostly because – I’m no longer “needed”! It has been incredibly satisfying to see the MQTT community grow over the past few years. The standardisation of the protocol at OASIS, the large number of implementations, and the ability of many other much smarter people to pick up the kinds of speaking engagements I was previously doing as a matter of course – all of these things make me immensely proud to have helped to lay the foundations for the success of that community over the past six years or so.

I’ve also been very happy to see the success of the Cloud Foundry platform and the people involved – having devoted the previous two years of my career to that nascent Open Source community, it is just fantastic to see it take off and the Foundation get started. Nice work to everyone involved.

I’ve again thoroughly enjoyed my speaking opportunities this year, and the chance to broaden my range. Obviously that has included a lot about the Twitter API and developer platform, and lots again about IoT; but I’ve also spoken on wearables, developer advocacy, and API management. I’m very happy that I got to be a part of the first Twitter Flight conference – one of my speaking career highlights.

Personally, I’ve tried to stay healthy this year (no heart scares, no falls…!); although my travel schedule has been demanding again (TripIt tells me I covered 66613 miles in the air). That did at least include a couple of trips for fun, rather than being all about business 🙂

The next year looks to be busy with more events to speak at (and organise!), and much more to do around the Twitter platform. As an historian, a sociologist and someone with a keen interest in the intersection of technology and people, I’m very excited to be a part of this wave of change.

I’ve been settling into my new role at Twitter over the past few months. I’m a Developer Advocate on the Developer and Platform Relations team, based out of a beautiful new London office we opened a few weeks ago.

It has been fantastic so far, learning about the Twitter platform and starting to work with partners and developers trying out the API. I’ve been a small part of a couple of feature launches which I’m incredibly proud to have helped with. We’ve run our first Twitter UK community Friday4Good which I helped to plan. As well as that, I’ve spoken about the Twitter API in the context of the Internet of Things at both Techsylvania in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and more recently at GOTO in Amsterdam.

Developers embraced Twitter early on, seeing it as an open platform that could enrich apps with contextual information and provide access to public conversations, sentiments and signals. Twitter enabled developers to create cool, new and fun experiences that were never before possible.

Oh, and if you want to follow what we are up to as a team, you should keep an eye on the @TwitterDev and @TwitterAPI handles, as well as @TwitterUK for more UK-centric news!

Day 2 of EclipseCon 2013 and we’ve already been seeing some strong interest in the M2M community and the kinds of projects we have been working on!

The story so far

There were two M2M events on day one. The first was the M2M tutorial featuring some real hardware (Raspberry Pi and Arduino), using the Koneki Lua Development Tooling to deploy scripts to the embedded Mihini runtime on the Pi to drive and take input from sensors over Modbus. I cheated a little and mixed in a bit of MQTT using the Paho Lua client, to have my kit publishing temperature and light data to a broker instead 🙂 It is early days for Eclipse Mihini, but it was a really slick demo and tutorial, and I’m looking forward to playing with this a lot more.

The evening Birds of a Feather session gave a group of us a couple of open hours to hack around with our Pi and Arduino kits. My own efforts were slightly thwarted by a European soldering iron and a 110V power supply, so I wasn’t able to assemble the add-on board I wanted for my Raspberry Pi, but I’ll get back to that in the future. For those looking to explore their new Raspberry Pis and hardware / GPIO interaction from Java, take a look at the pi4j project.

Building a community

One useful “war story” that was told today was in Benjamin Cabé’sBuilding the M2M Community talk. The slides will follow, but it was good to hear about the progress of the community and projects involved (yes, ok, I’m a Committer on one of them…) and also to hear about his “Community Manager Toolbox” for tracking and responding to community discussions. I use a very similar set of tools when I engage with the Cloud Foundry and MQTT communities (and others that I’m involved with).

In short: Engage the community. Be very public about what you are working on and where the roadmap is going. Get management buy-in for your projects to persuade them of the value of opening them to the community (use metrics to demonstrate take-up).

Working on standards

The other thing that has been going on today “behind the scenes” at EclipseCon has been the first meeting of the OASIS MQTT Technical Committee. It is exciting to see that Richard Coppen and Raphael Cohn have been elected as co chairs of the group, with seven sponsoring organisations from across the technology and messaging market and 35 publically-visible members – lots of interest in MQTT!

EclipseCon 2013 is here, and I’m in Boston with the great folks from around the community this week.

There’s a LOT of content around the machine-to-machine space this year, and growing interest in how to use instrumented devices with an embedded runtime with lightweight messaging. If you’ve not been following the progress of the M2M community at Eclipse, we now have an M2M portal, along with nice pages for each of the three associated projects Koneki, Mihini, and Paho.

The corridor conversations and late night beer sessions are as always invaluable, and myself and many of the other project folks will be around – I’m always happy to talk about Paho in particular. At Paho we now have updated Java and C MQTT clients in Git (NB check the ‘develop’ branch for the latest Java updates), along with the Lua client, and proposed contributions of Objective-C, Javascript and Python clients are at various stages of review looking to join the project.

Oh, and if you are interested in MQTT, come and find me for some MQTT Inside stickers that you can use with your own hardware projects 🙂